So I’m packing up after Day 3 of the one week blog challenge. This has been an overwhelming day!

I’ve spent the time I had today by looking into other blogs, communities, and forums on the subject to learn more. My first realization is that the highest ranking sites on my search term is basically just made up by lists displaying the highest ranked blogs in the area!

The result of our SEO

As you can see from the picture displaying this post, we haven’t received any real feedback from our SEO from yesterdays day 2. And neither should you expect that so don’t be discouraged.

SEO is something you do for the long run. The effect of our ranking is something that will keep on building over time.

But without yesterdays exercise, I wouldn’t be confident in ranking for anything, regardless of the competition.

I mentioned alternative keywords yesterday and that is definitely something I need to look more into it seems. Google had some suggestion of its own on what I might be interested in looking at.

Related Google Searches

It turned out that something that seemed much more popular then the term self-help was self-improvement.

I only found two actual real self-help blogs on the first page when I searched it on Google. This gives me a tremendous confident boost in that I might actually be able to rank for this specific keyword in the future!

Show your appreciation

Other then that there where mostly sites containing a compiled list of popular blogs. Which was a great source of resource in my case. The lists even contained some of my personal blog favorites!

If you find someone who makes your life easier by compiling a great source of information, be sure to give something back and show your appreciation.

Showing my appreciation by leaving a comment

Don’t come of as spammy

I learned my hard lesson when it comes to leaving comments and showing my appreciation in the past. The only place I’ve ever been banned from is problogger.com. Which happens to be my favorite resource site when it comes to blogging.

I read a post on the site on the particular subject of following the site culture when leaving comments. It stated that leaving links, and commenting where fine and dandy of course.

Naive as I was, I started to comment on some of the posts I read showing my appreciation and asking questions. I didn’t think about what a newly set up account commenting on several nine-year old posts in a row would look like. When I took a look in the comment section I felt that a lot of the comments came of just as spam or advertising. And sure enough I got flagged for spam.

The goal today was to show my appreciation and get out there and learn new stuff. But the execution of this days exercise is an art form and varies depending on where you go. Always read up and learn the site culture first before you take any actions.

Save distractions for later

Todays exercise came with a lot of challenges. Not only do you’ve to do your homework on every single place you decide to participate, you need to stay focused on the task.

I could easily have done todays exercise for an unlimited time (and you should keep doing work outside your own website frequently). But if you’re to get anything out from just a single day doing this, you need to learn how to prioritize and save things for later.

I’ve bookmarked around 50 things today alone of things I want to look into more or try to implement in the future. But I’ve also taken away dozens of best practices and advice I can put in use straight away from the leaders in my area. And if you’ve completed todays challenge, so should you’ve!